Dawn Grady on Statement Jewelry and Solopreneurship

Five years ago, Dawn Grady left her career as a marketing and public relations professional to pursue her passion: jewelry design. The Cincinnati native had been making jewelry as a side hustle, but a pitch competition led to her snagging a storefront on Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine. She now spends her time crafting one-of-a-kind mixed-metal jewelry pieces, which she sells at Junebug Jewelry Designs.

We met Dawn at her store to discuss the inspiration for her work, being a ‘solopreneur,’ and the joy of making her customers feel special.

Interview by Suzanne Wilder. Photography by Angie Lipscomb.

How did you start with jewelry making? 

It was just a hobby at the start. I literally went to Michael's, and I learned how to do bead stringing. That was the first thing. I would sit there and watch television and bead necklaces. And then I ended up with, like, 59 million of them. I'm like, okay, well, now I have Christmas presents to give. My first trunk show was probably about five to six years in. I still wasn't doing any of the hot stuff yet, but I was wire wrapping and doing more intricate designs. And I had my first trunk show at my mom's house and sold out. I was like, maybe I'll come up with a Facebook page and an Instagram page, and just started doing it kind of as a side hustle. 

And then COVID came around. And that's what made me want to say, you know what, maybe I can just try. Let me just see if I can do it. With my day job in marketing, everything with that started turning sour, and everything with the jewelry business started opening up. 

It has not been the easiest journey, but five years later, I'm still here. October first, that was five years from the day that I opened this store.

Where did the name of your business come from? 

My father called me Junebug, so I am Junebug. I really wanted to honor him, but then also I wanted it to be my jewelry. I wanted my name to be part of it, but Dawn Grady Jewelry is so corny. 

Did your prior work have any elements that felt like a natural pivot to running your own business? 

Being in marketing was certainly a natural fit. I'd already had a website. I already did the business incubator, things like that, that you could do with a side hustle. So I had a thriving website, a Pinterest presence, an Instagram presence, Facebook presence. The hard part is maintaining an inventory that you make yourself and doing all of the other things that run the business. That's been the trickiest part of all of this, you know, being a solopreneur is not easy.

It's also been very rewarding in terms of just learning everything. But, you know, I stay prayerful. I would encourage anybody that's going out there on their own to have a good relationship with God because you're gonna need it.

Has there also been a community of other entrepreneurs that you work with or that you've learned from? 

Oh, so many. I am on the retail committee for the Over-the-Rhine Chamber of Commerce. Working with all the ladies on this strip and just throughout (the neighborhood), we learn from each other consistently. I work with photographers that are local. I think Cincinnati is a wonderful place to launch a business because there is a lot of support for entrepreneurs here. We've done collective sip-and-shops where we're all serving different cocktails. I've worked with Molly Wellman. She puts her little bar sign in the window, and folks come in and get a Molly-made cocktail. She has what she calls the Junebug spritzer, which she makes out of her Cincinnati gin.

The Candle Lab, because I burn (a specially-blended) scent exclusively in here, they did a small run of those candles and labeled them with Junebug, so that I could give them to my best customers. So yeah, there's a lot of collective effort down here and working together that I’ve found.

Tell us about some of your jewelry designs. 

I use copper and semi-precious gemstones in my designs. And when it comes to my statement pieces, I only will design it once. If someone likes it and it's been sold, then that challenges me to make a second one or try to come up with something that's a little bit unique for them. I always make them so that they are super comfortable. 

The spiral, I use to represent the journey of life and to remind you not to be very milestone-driven, but to be moment-focused. Life is about moments and not the milestones. I just love to play with layers and texture. I use the metaphysical properties of the gemstones to create a piece that again reminds you of how you're supposed to show up in the world. I love cuffs because nothing says Wonder Woman like a cuff. So I love to rock these. My mama used to rock cuff bracelets back in the day.

Statement jewelry for me, really, the origin comes from my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt. All three of them were baddies of their own right. My grandmother was a jazz pianist, so when I was little, you know, she practiced at the piano. But then she'd go upstairs to get dressed, and I'd watch her get dressed, and she had a big jewelry armoire, and she'd pull out all her little statement pieces, and she'd put her gowns on, and then she'd go out. And she actually played; she had a gig every Friday and Saturday night until she was 88 years old.

I was just always raised to believe that, when you really were a boss, your jewelry reflected that. 

Where do you look for inspiration? 

Literally everywhere. Sometimes it could be something that's decor in my house. Sometimes I could see an arrangement of flowers, and just like the way the color is layered. Sometimes I might be watching television and see something that just makes me want to decide how to do it just a little bit differently, or structurally, I see how they've done that, but I would love to do this, this, this to it. So everywhere. Sometimes I just make what I feel like making in that moment. 

The things that really keep me coming back to this are when I'm flipping around on Facebook and see some of my customers, and I see them in their special life moments. The jewelry that they chose to wear during those moments is Junebug. That's just everything to me. My jewelry is now in Australia, it's in England, I've got a piece in Brazil, and of course, all across the country. There are a couple of pieces in Canada as well. 

Have there been milestones in the last five years where you felt really proud of where you are? 

Oh, so many. Being “Best in Chic” two years in a row, the amount of grant support that I've been able to earn, the fact that I've gotten grant support from multiple chambers of commerce here, the African-American Chamber has supported me, the Over-the-Rhine Chamber has supported me, Main Street Ventures, and the Iron Chest Fund with Mortar.

But also the times when I look up and see my customers. One customer had a U.S. citizenship swearing-in ceremony, and when she put all her pictures with the judge and her documents on Facebook, she was rocking one of my statement necklaces. Those are the kinds of moments that really stand out for me. The customers who use my pieces to represent when they need to feel special, that's what I did it for. 

What is the next part of the journey for you? 

The next part of the journey is getting more people to work in the business. Probably someone to work here in the store to give me back that time to create more. My vision for my business is that I can be the chief visionary officer and not the chief operations officer.

I really want to focus on the art and creating collections that resonate with people who want to show up in the world, and show up and show out. 

Tell us about an influential woman in your life.

I think of my entrepreneurial muse. Her name is Crystal. She has a spa called Grace and Grit Spa. Our fathers were best friends. And so we have played together since we were little.

When she was still dreaming of having a spa and I was still dreaming about what to potentially do with Junebug, she said to me on one of our morning runs, “You need to launch your business because you don't know whether or not God needs you to have that business in order to use it to bless somebody else.” And I thought, wow, that is super, super deep. 

She is my entrepreneurial muse. She is my person who has coached me through so many moments of how you get by when it's not going well. How you stay strong when things are starting to look a little dicey. But you have to keep going. You have to keep trying. You have to keep praying and believing, and praying and praying and praying and praying. 

In terms of who inspires me from a business standpoint, one of my most recent mentors is the jewelry designer, Douriean Fletcher. She was the jewelry designer for the Black Panther movies.

We'd had some online rapport, and she reached out to me about seeing if I would be interested in her coaching, and I was. And so she was the one who put bugs in my ear about doing museum work and just what the possibilities could be within this world of jewelry, beyond having a storefront. So I would say she's a huge inspiration. 

I’m always inspired by the woman who's considered the first African-American commercial jewelry designer in our country. Her name was Winifred Mason. There's not a lot written about her. She was the mentor to (jewelry designer) Art Smith. If you ask about a premier Black jewelry designer, most people will focus on Art Smith. But he learned from her. One of the things that I loved about her is that she used symbolism in her jewelry a lot. 

What is written about her suggests that she was difficult to work with. Sometimes, as a Black woman, you can't be assertive without it being interpreted as aggressive. That made me look to her – we have a similar style. One of her biggest customers was Nina Simone, who was a badass and who always told it like it was.

Those would be my inspirations: Crystal for entrepreneurship, Douriean for possibility, and Winifred for having a story.

Junebug Jewelry Designs is at 1327 Vine St in Cincinnati, as well as online: Instagram, Facebook, and the store’s website.